Audience Network

Facebook Audience Network Policy

1. Build a quality product

  1. Prohibited Content: Don't integrate or display ads in apps that contain or promote:
    1. Community Standards: Content that violates our Community Standards.
    2. Illegal Products or Services
    3. Sensational Content: Apps must not contain shocking, sensational, inflammatory or excessively violent content.
    4. Discriminatory Practices: Apps must not discriminate or encourage discrimination against people based on personal attributes such as race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability, medical or genetic condition.
    5. Unsafe Supplements: Apps must not promote the sale or use of unsafe supplements, as determined by Facebook in its sole discretion.
    6. Weapons, Ammunition, or Explosives: Apps must not promote the sale or use of weapons, ammunition, or explosives.
    7. Adult Content, Products or Services: Apps must not contain adult content, products or services. This includes nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, sexual tips or fetishes, casual dating, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.
    8. Surveillance Equipment: Apps must not promote the sale of spy cams, mobile phone trackers or other hidden surveillance equipment.
    9. Hacking or Cracking
    10. Work At Home Schemes
    11. Penny or Pay Per Bid Auctions: Apps that promote or facilitate penny auctions or pay per bid auctions.
    12. Voting Information: Apps must not provide procedural voting information and apps must not solicit voter registration information.
    13. Exchanging or Trading In Social Engagement: Don't integrate or display ads in apps that contain or promote the purchase, sale, or exchanges of “likes”, “shares”, “followers”, “comments”, “accounts”, “pages”, “groups”, or any other Facebook feature or functionality.
    14. Facebook Imitation: Don't integrate or display ads on apps that could easily be confused, by design and/or experience, with Facebook or other Facebook apps and products. This includes apps that imitates Facebook or other Facebook apps and products.
    15. Unacceptable Business Practices: Apps must not promote products, services, schemes or offers using deceptive or misleading practices, including those meant to scam people out of money or personal information.
    16. Prohibited Financial Services: Apps must not promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, including, but not limited to, initial coin offerings, binary options, and contracts for difference trading.
    17. Deceptive Employment: Apps must not promote unreasonable or unrealistic claims with regard to employment opportunities.
    18. Spam: Apps may not spam digital distribution platforms, which includes uploading multiple or similar versions of an app. Apps also must not omit basic information about the app, such as screenshots of the user interface or a description.
    19. Sweepstakes: Apps must not promote free-to-play experiences where randomly selected users are able to earn or win real money or anything of monetary value.
  2. Restricted Content
    1. Real Money Gambling: Apps and sites that promote or facilitate online gaming/gambling where anything of monetary value (including digital currencies) is required to play and anything of monetary value forms part of the prize, are only allowed with our prior written permission. Online gaming/gambling may include betting, lotteries, raffles, casino, fantasy sports, bingo, poker and sweepstakes in an online environment.
    2. User-Generated Content: Don't integrate or display ads in apps that consist primarily of user-generated content, without our prior written permission.
  3. Low Quality or Disruptive Content: Don't display ads on apps that are not fully-functional or that provide an unexpected, disruptive, or misleading experience. This includes apps that contain a disproportionate volume of ads relative to content, or ads that drive a negative user experience such as ads that are highly sexual, visually shocking, or promote scams.
  4. Spyware or Malware: Don’t disseminate spyware, malware, or any software that results in an unexpected or deceptive experience. This includes links to sites containing these products.
  5. Inaccurate App Information: Ensure the ad call always contains accurate information about your approved app or site. This includes but is not limited to placement size and top-level URL.
  6. Obfuscated Ads: Don’t remove, obscure, or minimize any ad in any way without our written permission.
  7. Editing or Modifying Ads: Apps must not edit, modify, filter, truncate or change the order of the information contained in any ad without our written permission. Apps must not use ad formats (including native ad formats) that cut off or minimize the creative either partially or wholly. Ad components (including Media View) should be fully viewable and recognizable by the user.
  8. Ad Scraping: Don’t "crawl", "spider", index or in any non-transitory manner store or cache information obtained from any ads.
  9. Privacy Notice: Include a privacy policy that adequately discloses your privacy practices.
  10. Implementation Requirements: Ensure you follow the Implementation Requirements for Audience Network Ads. For example, you must include the expandable “AdChoices” icon on your native ad and clearly mark your native ad as “Sponsored”, Promoted” or Ad” unless you have our prior written permission.

2. Give people control

  1. Inflated Accidental Clicks: Don’t place ads where people are likely to accidentally click (ex: placing ads where people randomly click or place their fingers, such as near buttons).
  2. Clickable Content: Ensure that only ad titles, URLs, Call-to-Action, and image assets are clickable (i.e., white space and the background of an ad must not be clickable).
  3. Obscuring Content: Don’t include ads that cover up or hide any area of interest during typical interaction.
  4. Distinguishing Ads From Content: Ensure ads are clearly distinguishable from other content within your app.
  5. Interface Interference: Don't interfere with the interface flow resulting from ad interaction or suppress views that pop-up as a result of such interaction.
  6. Forced Engagement: Ensure that clicking an ad is not the only way to exit a screen.

3. Encourage proper use

  1. Rights to the App: Don't use Audience Network unless you either own or operate the apps or the owner of the apps has given you exclusive third-party rights to monetize the inventory, or have our prior written permission. Developers must complete the app ownership verification process in order to monetize the apps.
  2. Artificial Inflation: Ensure you implement Audience Network in a way that delivers the expected clicks, impressions or conversion (i.e., avoid implementing Audience Network in a way that artificially inflates clicks, impressions or conversions). For example, don’t use automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means (ex: through repeated manual clicks or the use of bots) to artificially inflate clicks, impressions or conversions, and ensure that one click on an ad only logs one click.
  3. Artificial Traffic: Don't integrate or display ads in apps whose traffic is generated from automated processes (i.e., don't use Audience Network if you use spiders or any other non-human traffic to drive people to your app or site).
  4. Ad Stacking: Don’t stack multiple ads in a single ad placement.
  5. Unexpected Navigation: Don't direct people to pages where they do not express an intent to be directed.
  6. Misleading Labels: Don't place misleading labels near ads (ex: "Top Offers" or "Favorite Apps").
  7. Deceptive Claims: Don’t make deceptive claims that encourage or mislead people into clicking on ads.
  8. Soliciting Engagement: Don't encourage people to engage with ads because it will help your app or site directly (ex: don't ask people to support you by engaging with ads).
  9. COPPA Compliance: Ensure compliance with the U.S. Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA"). You must also comply with our usage notes.
  10. Incentivized Engagement: Don't incentivize people to view or click on an ad, or give the impression that viewing or clicking on an ad will be rewarded. This policy does not apply to Rewarded Video ads.
  11. Additional Policies for Rewarded Video Ads:
    1. Opt-In Criteria Not Met: Users must proactively opt-in to viewing each ad at the time each ad is served. Acceptable opt-ins include, but are not limited to, a tap-to-play interaction or a countdown timer. Offering a one-time opt-in to viewing all rewarded ads is not acceptable. Proactive opt-in requires 1) clear disclosure of the reward and 2) ability to close or exit the ad without closing the app after the disclosure.
    2. Financial Rewards: Don't offer people monetary compensation or cash equivalents in exchange for viewing the ad. This includes but is not limited to gift cards, cryptocurrencies or in-app tokens or credits that are able to be redeemed for real money by the user or subsequent users.
    3. Injection of Rewarded Video Ads: Rewarded Video Ads may only be placed after a material break in the experience (i.e. level completed in a game) or, if there are no material breaks, the developer must place limits on Rewarded Video Ads (i.e. maximum 3 Rewarded Video Ads in a specific period of time) and disclose that it uses Rewarded Video Ads in the digital store where it is downloaded.
    4. Non-Viewing Rewards: You can only offer users rewards for watching ads. Don’t offer rewards for user activity outside of watching the ad. This includes but is not limited to offers for rewards for downloading an app or other deep funnel conversion events.
    5. Transferrable Rewards: Don't offer rewards that can be transferred between users. This includes but is not limited to gifts or tipping mechanisms.
    6. Rewards Probability Disclosure: You may offer random rewards, but the probability of winning the reward must be disclosed to the user, previous to the explicit opt-in, in clear readable text. Each ad must communicate the probability of winning on the call-to-action; blanket disclosures within the app are not compliant.
    7. Immediate Rewards: Ensure you deliver the reward immediately after a person finishes viewing the ad, and that the reward is redeemable from within the app or site where the ad was launched.
    8. Exit Interference: Do not disable or alter users' ability to close, skip or exit rewarded video experiences.
    9. Interstitial Alternatives: If users choose NOT to watch a rewarded video ad, do not show them an interstitial ad instead.
    10. Unearned Rewards: If users choose to close the ad before the end, or use a report/hide flow to dismiss the ad, you may not grant them the reward.
  12. Program Installation: Don't encourage people to install programs that inject ads.
  13. Ads Outside App: Don’t show ads in the background or outside of the app. Users should know what app an ad is running in. Ads should not run when the user is not actively using the app.
  14. SDK Modification: Don't modify, translate, create derivative works of, or reverse engineer any SDK or its components.
  15. Real Users: Don’t use bots, automated tools or software to mimic human behavior. Ads must be shown on real devices to real users who are actively engaged with the ads.
  16. Misrepresentation: Don’t misrepresent information related to your own or someone else’s business including, but not limited to, administrators, financial information, company details, app and app versions, app store, or users.
  17. Ads After Uninstall: Don’t show ads to a user if that user has uninstalled your app.
  18. Law and Guidelines Compliance: Comply with all applicable laws and adhere to our developer's guidance.
  19. Auto-Refreshing Ads: Don't automatically refresh Audience Network ads. Don't manually re-request Advertisers' assets for an ad or display Audience Network ads through a mediation platform that implements automatic refresh mechanisms.

4. Things you should know

  1. We reserve the right to reject, approve or remove any Publisher or app or site for any reason, in our sole discretion, including Publishers and apps that negatively affect our relationship with our users or advertisers, or that promote content, services, or activities, contrary to our competitive position, interests, or advertising philosophy. These guidelines are subject to change at any time.
  2. Abnormal Behavior: We may limit or remove your access to Audience Network if our systems detect possible violations of our policies or potential harm to our advertisers and users. For example, if our systems detect abnormal behaviors, we may suspend your use of Audience Network to confirm compliance with our terms and policies (ex: to check for a possible incentivizing violation, or to ensure you've properly implemented Audience Network to avoid artificial clicks, impressions or conversions).
  3. Ad Policies Violation: Apps that serve ads with severe or repeated violations of our Advertising Policies will be removed from Audience Network.
  4. Content Monetization Policies: Content that does not meet our Content Monetization Policies may be ineligible for monetization.
  5. App Availability: Audience Network is only available to apps offered in Apple iTunes or Google Play, unless you have our prior written approval.
  6. Patterns of Abuse: We analyze every impression and click for patterns of abuse. If we determine that a publisher account might pose a risk to our advertisers, we may disable that account to protect our advertisers' interests.
  7. App-ads.txt: Prior to onboarding, Publishers that maintain an ads.txt or app-ads.txt file must include Audience Network listed appropriately and accurately.
  8. Instant Games Performance: Instant Games must meet our Game Quality Guidelines to monetize through Audience Network.
  9. Updated Standards: From time to time, we may provide new or updated publisher quality standards. You agree to comply with these standards, including any instructions or notices we may provide you relating to quality.